Okay, I've been wondering about this for a while, so I hope someone can help me out.
I was wondering about the origin of the ALLCAPS~! punctuation. What does it mean? Who started it? Does it mean anything other than really really important?
Help?
Ike
"Go for the eyes, Boo! GO FOR THE EYES! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" - Minsc, Baldur's Gate.
I suspect it dates back to the days of Usenet and the restrictions of 7-bit ascii.
With no pretty HTML or faux-HTML tags to use to make with the bold and the underline and the pretty colors and the hey-hey, you have to find a distinctive way to emphasize.
I actually seem to recall something about l33tsp34k being the origin of the tildebang, but that's just heresy at this point (although I'd find it fitting that the IWC took a page out of the book of B1FF~!).
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform, And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Originally posted by CRZDEAN~! invented it. His fingers were really FAT back then, so when he got excited, he'd hit both buttons unwittingly.
(I may have made up the second part.)
What do you mean back then? I have known him for awhile and his fingers ain't getting any smaller...
Wow...
That doesn't read terribly well.
Anyway - Chris is pretty close. Dean went to hit the exclamation point one day, missed and hit the tilde instead. He really liked the way it looked and it stuck.
Now it is mainly used (at least by us) in the sarcastic sense, like TAZZ~!
I searched google far and wide to try to find the use of tildebang outside the IWC, but could find nothing but a Mac-fanatic who likes to torment the (former?) publicist of Ambrosia Software by calling him Jason WHONG~!
Given that buddy with the site has a picture of himself on the web with a viking hat on, it's very, very possible he reads the IWC. In fact, his writing style seems to have taken more than a page or two from Dean.
In closing, I was way wrong. All hail DEAN~! Innovator of Punctuation.
I was allowed back into the Place to Be Nation last night, where I was the special guest on the MAIN EVENT - their biweekly panel - talking RAW and generally engaging in a game of "Hey, remember stuff?" I BELIEVE I held my own. http: